Moonlight on PowerPC Mac

Question

Silverlight stopped supporting PowerPC Macs after version 1.0. Will Moonlight 2.0 work on a PowerPC Mac?

We are looking at writing the next generation of our product and we are considering Silverlight. However due to our existing customer base, we could not afford to cut off PowerPC Mac users at this time, and we'd like to avoid parallel development.

Answer 1

Moonlight requires an x86 processor, so it won't work on PowerPC. Here's the Moonlight supported platforms list.

Answer 2

I don't think Moonlight runs on OsX at all. I can't find any reference to it running on Mac. Does anyone have a link that shows otherwise?

Answer 3

Moonlight currently is made up of a few components:

• Mono Runtime (cross platform, works on many platforms, including PowerPC and OSX)
• Graphics engine (cross platform)
• Video engine (cross platform)
• Browser gate (currently only supports Firefox)
• Windowing system integration (currently only supports X11)

There have been discussions about writing more browser gateways for new browsers, but so far it has not been a priority. If Moonlight were to be ported to the Mac, a gate to Safari would be necessary.

Currently Moonlight is very tied to the X11 implementation, so that piece would also have to be decoupled to work on other windowing systems.

It should be relatively easy (couple of weeks of work) to get the Moonlight engine to run on the Mac. Doing the gateway to the browser might be a few more weeks.

Miguel.